Currently at Tom Kyte’s session regarding topics new, improved or coming in Oracle Application Development. Tom told about the history APEX has gone thru and the current setup with the APEX Listener and even the “PL/SQL Gateway” was mentioned. I always have to laugh a bit because this last one touches the XDB Protocol Server which can do way more then only this PL/SQL extension for APEX which has been embedded in this XDB Protocol Server framework. There is a APEX book out there that touches a bit the possibilities of the framework, one of the reasons I will promote and explain it a bit more during conferences like UKOUG, because I think its a shame that people don’t know its full potential. Anyway. Tom stressed once again that APEX is a serious environment regarding the huge websites out there based on APEX supporting 1000th of user sessions. Also it nowadays had a better debug support (4.1) and use / support for ROWID, improved data upload and calendar wizard support and redesigned websheets in APEX 4.1.

(more…)